Post #205 – Women’s Memoirs, Writing Prompts and Life Prompts – Matilda Butler
Fiction Reminds Us How to Write About Characters Who Become Real
Fiction and non-fiction are polar opposites. Or are they? Sure one is made up and one, like memoir, is based on truth. But to engage the reader, both need well developed people. Readers won’t stick with you if you are just telling then about “this happened to me” or “that happened to me.” Readers need to care about you and in order to do that they really need to know you.
I was reading about Tina French’s novels recently and was once again reminded of the importance of sharing not just your story but the people in your life. Good books are always about people. Yet many memoirists want to focus on story. Tuck this away — what happened is never as interesting as the who it happened to and what they did as a result of what happened.
Tina French’s most recent novel is The Secret Place. The discussion of her book in Time Magazine talks about the eight teens in the novel:
“…[French] parades these adolescents past the reader, one after another, squirming under the lights–no stereotypes, no clichés, each utterly distinct in her adolescent oddity, each the potential hero of her own novel.”
How do you begin this process of developing characters, or in the case of memoir, revealing characters?
“French starts with appearances: “pretty, but that jaw was going to give her man face before she was 30”; “no height, no neck and no waist, plenty of nose to make up for it”; “all gold and bloom.”
Physical description is such a fantastic way to begin. It lets us focus on an aspect of the people in our memoir that we know. We can even remember hairstyles, clothes, and perhaps perfume from earlier times. But that’s just the beginning.
“Then French goes deeper, sketching each girl’s real self, her inner self, the secret place where she keeps her strengths and weaknesses and longings.”
This is what needs to happen during the course of writing your memoir. Consider how you will reveal each person’s strengths, weaknesses, and longings. No person is 100 percent perfect. No person is 100 percent terrible. The memoirist needs to gradually expose people across the pages, building on each revelation so that the reader comes to know the people and why they did what they did.
Details, details, details. Even seemingly unimportant details such as the cockeyed blink of an eye, the swish of a dress, the self-conscious hand in front of a laughing mouth that hides the crooked teeth, the restless tapping of a heel unveil personality and character and bring the reader into the story, help the reader see scenes as they unfold.
Don’t we owe ourselves and those in our story the same attention to detail, the same in-depth understanding that fiction authors give their characters? Memoir writers, if anything, should know how to build strong, real characters because that’s the point of writing. But it takes digging deep and deeper into the main characters you are writing about.
Hint: And One More Thing
We try to remember the emotional content when we write dialogue. But sometimes it is hard to recall what a scene was like when we were younger. Consider this. You can do research by listening to teenagers now and make notes about their conversations. Or, you can read a fiction book with teenagers from the appropriate year you are writing about, or watch a movie with teenagers from the relevant years, etc. In other words, do your research.
And why do I mention this at the end of talking about character? Tina French eavesdropped on teenagers to ensure that the dialogue she crafted was authentic.
Memoir Writing Prompt
1. Write down your name.
2. List 10 personal physical attributes. Don’t shorten this to five. I have chosen the number 10 because it will make you go beyond the obvious. If you can, extent your list to 15 or 20 personal physical attributes. The deeper you go, the more you will begin to see ways to describe yourself that help readers see you, to recognize you in a crowd. That’s what you want.
